Pete Davidson sparks outrage with ‘gay dude’ joke and says ex Ariana Grande is ‘fair game’ in new Netflix special

Pete Davidson’s new stand-up comedy special arrived on Netflix on Tuesday (25 February), and it has proven to be quite controversial.

Alive from New York features jokes about the gay community that have sparked outrage on social media, with some accusing him of homophobia for suggesting gay men use their sexuality as an excuse to harass women.

In the special, Davidson says: “It’s that gay dude that’ll run up on your girlfriend and squeeze her boobs and slap her ass and be like, ‘Damn, girl, you look great!’

“I don’t find that f***ing funny. Like, at all. I’m sorry. Like, I’m all for the gayness, you know, it doesn’t mean I’m against gayness. It’s just like, you get to slap ass on a technicality? That’s not f***ing fair at all.”

In a viral thread on Twitter, writer Jill Gutowitz called the joke “extremely damaging”, while another said the show is “just a bunch of hack-y jokes about guys we’ve all heard a thousand times like 20 years ago”.

A third wrote: “Pete Davidson’s jokes about gay men are so strange because they’re like a straight man’s idea of what he might do if he could touch women however he wanted and they’d take it as a joke.”

“Straight women defending that Pete Davidson promo video… He’s literally saying gay men get to sexually harass women ‘on a technicality’, as in, he wants to have an excuse do it too,” said another. “He’s misogynistic AND homophobic, how is that hard to understand.”

Davidson also takes aim at his ex-girlfriend Ariana Grande in the special, saying: “I wasn’t going to do jokes about this, but then my buddy told me, he’s like, ‘Yo, I recently heard that Ariana said she had no idea who you were and she just dated you as a distraction.’ So now I just think it’s like fair game.”

Later, he joked: “She won Billboard’s Woman of the Year, and I got called ‘butthole eyes’ by barstoolsports.com.”

Another notable part of the Netflix special was Davidson taking back his apology to Texas politician Dan Crenshaw, whose eyepatch he previously mocked by saying Crenshaw looked like “a hitman in a porno movie”. Crenshaw lost his eye while serving in Afghanistan.

Davidson now says in the special that he received death threats for the joke and was forced to apologise by his mother. “I didn’t think I did anything wrong,” he said. “It was like words that were twisted so that a guy could be famous... So I made fun of this guy with an eyepatch and then, like, I kind of got forced to apologise…

“The only thing I did do, which I am guilty of and I apologised for, is I did make that guy famous,” he said, “and a household name for no reason. I did what Ariana Grande did for me.”

It was recently reported that the comedian has been ruffling feathers behind-the-scenes at Saturday Night Live, after he criticised the sketch series for “making fun of [him]”.

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